Ceci n'est pas une movie?

I have just watched another one of those so-called compilation programmes (Great Movie Mistakes 2: The Sequel, presented by Robert Webb, BBC 3, January 30), and have come to one conclusion: boring. Aside from the (pop) corny name and the disorienting, quick-cut presentation style, what do programmes like GMM2 tell us, except that movie directors are human and do make mistakes. The entire format has raised questions in my mind. Who are these people who have seemingly nothing else to do by scan decades of film footage, and grow orgasmic when they spot a continuity error in the plot? Do they get paid for it, and how much? And are these errors so very deleterious of said movies, great and small, in any case?
So what if Johnny Depp’s dark glasses mirror the camera as he plays Willie Wonka, or Roger Moore is suffering from necktie confusion. Didn’t James Bond have a number of more pressing matters on his mind, like keeping the West secure against the nasty Commies, and the attractive young lady awaiting him in the hotel bedroom?
At one level, the errors will be of use to film historians in centuries to come. At another level, they raise questions about the nature of reality. A movie is a work of art; it is not ‘real’ any more than a book or painting is. The cinema audience knows this, as do the actors and the director. An error in a movie is akin to a pentimento in a painting, those charming blunders that become more apparent on the surface of an oil painting as it ages. But you don’t go into a gallery in search of the perfect painting, any more than a reader seeks the perfect book.
In any work of art, the artist seeks to create an illusion, one that can paradoxically be shattered by the over-earnest search for perfection by the artist. We all know that Leonardo’s grandly-dressed urban lady could not really have stood against a backdrop of fields and mountains, but from all over the world we flock to see the Mona Lisa. In my opinion, the worst thing they ever did during the Renaissance was to tell wannabee artists about Zeuxis and the grapes – but that is a story for another time.

Go compare?

The rumblings of discontent that were soft at first have grown louder and louder until they now reach a crescendo as loud and screechy as the advertisement in question – yes, that one, that dire travesty of an opera singer telling us to go compare. Newspaper columnists, footballers’ wives, my relatives, all, are rising in protest against Go Compare man. Yet, no-one seems to be able to do anything about him. Like the common cold, he just will not go away. My take?
I hate that man. I can’t stand him. I can’t stand his fright wig nor those twirly-twirly fake mustachios. I can’t stand the way they’ve stuffed his paunchy body into that evening suit. I can’t stand those cloying warblings that parody the entire notion of what real opera singing is – come back, Nessun Dorma. All is forgiven.
Just recently, I noticed that they have watered down the original advertisement into a monochrome, flickering, ye olde filme pastiche of its former self. But it is too little, too late. Go Compare man still takes centre stage, and an entire generation has been alienated from the opera. Significantly, in spite of his persistent bleatings, I still didn’t know what he was telling up to go compare, or how, or why. I took courage and paid a visit to the Go Compare website. To my horror I discovered that Go Compare man has an identity. He is named Gio Compario, writes a regular blog and, surprise, surprise, his blogging is just as appealing as his singing. Just recently, new words to his song have floated into my head. Join me now in singing I despair, I despair…

The Tangram...

Most board games leave me well, bored, but there are some delightful exceptions topping the boxed heaps of chaff. One of these is that tantalising Chinese puzzle, the tangram. Its origins are lost in millennia, and it arrived in America in 1815, shipped by a Captain M. Donaldson. It was an instant hit in the parlour-bound society of the West where countless ladies sat, looking for material to manipulate with relentlessly restless fingers. The tangram, also a brain teaser, proved an ideal distraction.
It consists of a square carved into seven definable geometric pieces, five triangles, a parallelogram and a small square, a fraction the area of its larger parent. These shapes can be formed into thousands of patterns that resemble people, animals, birds and so on. Their stylised nature is prescient of suprematism, an artistic philosophy that emerged in the early twentieth century. Kasimir Malevich found abstract, geometrical forms the embodiment of a higher reality. Whatever, there is something eminently soothing about the hours spent focused upon these shapes, forming and reforming them again.
The tangram presents a number of mathematical paradoxes best defined by experts in the many books written about it. The puzzle can be made of materials like plastic, cardboard, and so on. But for a more sensual touch, seek out a set in classy wood. My young niece has a ‘competitive’ version, where two players seek to outwit each other in constructing tangram forms selected at random from a deck of cards. But I would eschew the competitive element and simply get lost in the sheer pleasure got from working with ‘pure’ forms, a reminder that I once dubbed geometry visual poetry.